As you can see from the above specs, the Ricoh seems to be the faster of the two drives. Yamaha handicap is the 16x reading speed compared to Ricoh's 24x reading speed. Both the drives support the same CD formats as well as recording modes. The one thing that looked funny in the above specs is Ricoh's claimed 8 MB/sec max transfer rate. If you do the math, you will find that Ricoh's 24x reading speed allows only for a 7.2 MB/sec max transfer rate. Let's take a look at the numbers and see if the specs have any truth in them.